Importing POP3 Accounts into Gmail

The official Gmail blog has posted some “Tips for importing old mail to Gmail” which focus on how to use the feature to fetch email from another POP3 account. This is useful if you still have your old email stored on the server in your POP3 account. Of course, if you downloaded your email to Outlook, Thunderbird, Entourage, Mail.app or some other client already, you’ll be better off to use IMAP access to upload your archived email to an IMAP folder.

I enabled IMAP access for my account and uploaded thousands of archived messages to Gmail going back more than 10 years. I love the ability to search all my old email with Google. It’s actually faster than using a local client, and it’s accessible from anywhere.